


maybe I've been gone

by MiniNephthys



Category: End Roll (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 15:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8290928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniNephthys/pseuds/MiniNephthys
Summary: Kantera, and name meanings.





	

Ryuuzen’s name has two characters in it. The first is for ‘dragon’ and the second is for ‘zen’, as in the school of Buddhism.

His parents were Zen Buddhists, and so was his grandfather, and his father before him. Since his parents passed away in an accident when he was so young, he learned more from his grandfather than from them, and he learned what they’d wanted from him by naming him that.

To be strong and wise, like a dragon, and to always be aware of himself, to someday awaken to his buddha-nature and be content with his life. Thus, Ryuuzen.

Ryuuzen was as religious as anyone else in Japan was, he supposed. He attended festivals as well as funerals, and learned the proper traditions of each that had been passed down in his culture for countless generations. Whether he believed in where those traditions came from was another question entirely - but he still respected their origins without believing in them.

His grandfather taught him meditation. He learned to concentrate only on his breath, and to be in the present moment as much as possible without concerns for the past or future. He focused on koans, though he never was able to truly grasp them.

‘What did your face look like before your parents were born?’

When he expressed to his grandfather that it surely looked like nothing at all, his grandfather laughed and told him to think on it a little more.

He was never able to understand that particular koan, no matter how much he tried. But he could concentrate on his breathing while banishing most other thoughts, and he could sit with the correct posture, and so he considered that an adequate first step on the way to awareness. He was young - no one grasped their buddha-nature in their early twenties. Besides, it was an excellent way to calm himself and rid himself of the day’s meaningless worries.

Gradually, he stopped meditating together with his grandfather. Ryuuzen was too busy, or his grandfather had no time for it between naps, or sitting correctly proved to be too much of a challenge to hs diminishing health. He mediated by himself instead.

The first time he tried meditation after - that incident - he couldn’t calm himself. He could sit in the right posture, but his fears and regrets plagued him to the point where he couldn’t concentrate. Even in another country, ghosts and voices followed him across oceans and unseen borders.

Full awareness of himself no longer seemed like a goal he wanted to pursue. Fully knowing himself would lead him farther and farther away from contentment, and into despair. That much, he was certain of, and so he never tried meditation again.

Kantera is a name that means nothing. There are no goals within its letters, nor any hopes for him as a person, whether given to him by someone else or chosen himself. It is simply something for him to be called.

He prefers it that way.


End file.
